As for different versions of the same people being around over a thousand years after the point where history was changed, and how that doesn't mesh with the current understanding of the so-called "butterfly effect;" our protagonist in this story is a human uses the mystical energy of fire and rage to transform into a genetically impossible, six-limbed, flying reptile that blatantly ignores the square-cube law to maintain flight (spontaneously generating several hundred kilos of mass out of where?). He uses another kind of mystical energy generated by the corpse of a another genetically impossible, six-limbed, flying reptile (this time with added bigness) to time travel into the past and save that long-dead reptile from an even older and larger genetically impossible, six-limbed, flying reptile. This has the effect of ensuring the survival of one or more species of magically generated, genetically impossible, six- (and eight-) limbed, flying reptiles that had gone extinct, fundamentally altering the timeline of the world.
Causality has little to do with "science". If we cannot expect causal dependancy in events, then what can we actually expect from a story. When I throw a rock into a lake of water I expect the rock to sink to the bottom, not float at the top. Of course, when the lake is somehow magical and turns the rock into a flower then that is attributed to a special property of the lake. However, so far, there has been nothing to indicate that Tarkir somehow clones the people from alternate timelines or bends its own timeline in such a way that every person is a universal constant.
Even if that were true it raises the question, why is it important for the plane, to have a Taigam on it, but not who he is aligned with. Why are some things arbitrarily constant actross timelines and others aren't. The lack of causality really opens a can of worms. Suspension of disbelief is something that a story has to achieve and not just set. You cannot expect people to suspend their disbelief, you need to make them do it.
The thing is, even if we do try and pick the story apart logically, people are using faulty logic to do so. Yes, it is true that the butterfly effect makes it very unlikely that Tarkir 1.1 would have nearly identical versions of the people from Tarkir 1.0, but it isn't impossible. If you think it is, I don't think you really understand how probability works.
If I put the individual parts of a cellphone inside a box and shake it, it is also theoretically possible to open the box with a complete cellphone inside. Possible, but so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all.
If the story is going on the direction of waking up Ugin, the obstacle might be that 3 planeswalkers and ghostfire will be needed to open up the hedrons. So i'm guessing he'll meetup with Sorin and another PW. My guess is that Narset is a strong candidate for the third. Aside from previous hints, she may be the one with the knowledge on where to find the information on Ghostfire, and they may have to assault/infiltrate Ojutai's stronghold to get ahold of the forgotten, lost teachings.
That's assuming the hedron works the same, which we don't really have any evidence for considering it didn't work the same when Sarkhan triggered it in the first place.
yes we don't have evidence, but i assume that's the same way it would have, otherwise, Yasova and other would have tried to finish off Ugin. so there has to be a condition to open the hedrons. Ugin would not have devised another way since he would have buried the secret with him, and he wouldn't want that. so a method already known should be the case.
The setting for all of MtG is the Multiverse where there is an infinite number of worlds/planes/galaxies (terminology doesnt really matter). Using similar logic, when Sarkhan goes back in time there is basically an infinite of number outcomes or future Tarkirs, and maybe they all happened at the same time but branched off as each little event changed. Every different choice made by an individual creating a new parallel universe, and WOTC "picked" the parallel universe that they liked best in order to make what they believe is the best set.
I dont get how time traveling can get people all upset when we have literally never done it and therefore no idea how would/could really work. Whose to say "temporal forces" wouldnt try to keep things as close as possible to their original outcome.
Just enjoy the ride people, not all stories have to fit into your logic to be enjoyed. And lets be clear on this; entertainment is more important than logic in these stories. If your willing suspension of disbelief can't extend that far, then maybe you should either stick to harder forms of speculative fiction or avoid the genre altogether. I'm not saying that to be snarky; fantasy requires a stretch of acceptance that not everyone can make. When you go as far as MtG's setting goes, applying real-world logic or modern scientific knowledge to it can be a sure-fire way to ruin your experience of the story. There's a large degree of internal consistency within the Tarkir storyline IMO, and most of the problems people point out with it come from outside Tarkir ("This previous MtG storyline was better"), outside MtG ("I like how franchise X did time travel more than this"), or meta problems ("I hate time travel stories"). I don't like all the characters (Sidisi and Shu Yun were particularly underdeveloped, I think) and there was rather weak writing on some of the "filler" entries; but the main plot so far has been pretty good, especially since Sarkhan's little time-jump back. I like that even though Sarkhan has a better sense of himself, he's still wildly emotional and having a hard time understanding the effects of his actions in the past.
Well guys this is a fantasy not the real world so what's the big deal.
"A wizard did it" is not a good trope. I, and many other people, prefer stories to be internally consistent so that I can get involved. If I'm rooting for Frodo to go to Mount Doom and destroy the ring, I don't want him to suddenly say "actually, we don't need to go to Mount Doom, instead I'll just use this artifact we never mentionned that can destroy the ring forever". If you introduce a very rare Spice that enables you to do all kinds of magic, you don't want to casually mention that actually all that magic is done without the Spice by other factions in the Empire. It's easy to conceive of consistent rules for time travel. There are basically two flavors:
* Temporal loops. There is only one universe, and whatever happened happened. But instead of being acyclic, the causality graph can have arrow in both directions. An object can exist only because of a time loop: for exampe I can come across an object, then travel back in time to put it where I know I will find it: this object does not exist outside of a time loop. It can make some interesting stories but it's quite hard to use correctly as a plot device.
* Alternate universes. Everythime you go back in time you create a new universe, originated at your point of arrival, with no possible communication. Those rarely make interesting stories.
* Unspecified rules. Those are for stories that are really "fish out of temporal water" instead of using time travel as a plot device. Basically the time travel happens at the beginning and does not feature later in the story. I don't really count those as time-travel stories for this reason.
Warning: The following rant may be hard to follow, it's hard to judge. The TL;DR version is "too many big things change for us to accept that the small things stay the same."
Generally, good but not great time travel stories use non-explicit rules that are slightly inconsistent: you do create an alternate universe but somehow "merge" with your copy from that universe so that you are only one being. This is for example what is done is the Back to the Future movies. Yes, upon closer inspection they make no sense: Marty would definitely not exist with the same appearance and personnality given the different history of his parents, I mean according to all probability he was not made from the same gametes, and certainly not raised in the same environment. But at least you can sort of believe it: the movie handwaves this partly using "time loop" tropes, with Marty's mother mentionning that Marty is a nice name, and so on.
In this story, we have massive changes made a very, very long time ago, that somehow completely changed several aspects of Tarkir while leaving other untouched. Statistically, all the ghostfire warriors executed by Ugin were ancestors of all KTK-present Jeskai, which means their genealogy in DTK should be completely different. Even with an explanation (as in Terry Pratchett) of the universe wanting to right itself towards a "default" version, it does not justify the fact that many characters had completely different parents and yet apparently turned out to look and be named the same as some other character from KTK. It's even worse when you consider that there are probably a lot less humans in this version of Tarkir than in the previous one. If this is the case, then why do all the characters have "new" versions. Did the magical time-travel thing note the personalities of a select few humans and ported them into this new reality while making a backstory for them? Why them? It feels arbitrary and forced, and not at all what you would expect given the premise.
To try to put it another way: if someone made a movie about a white person returning through time to the American Civil War and making the South win instead of the North, you would not expect the protagonist to return to their present day family and find the same people with the same name, but owning slaves. That would normally utterly break your suspension of disbelief. The change in the universe is more important by several orders of magnitude than what people look like or what they're called. When Marty changes the relationship between his parents, we buy it that he stays mostly the same. When uchronies change the outcome of a war or another, we buy it that history after that stays roughly the same (for example: WW1 and WW2 still happen evn if the SOuth win the Civil War). When someone goes to the Jurrasic to get a dinosaur egg, we buy it that they did not change anything to our present when the butterfly effect could really have made everything different. But here we have a dragon sized-butterfly that fails to even produce enough wind to pick up a piece of paper.
Very interesting read. I certainly agree with what you're trying to convey.
I just want to point out that in the case of something like Back to the Future, it's a bit different. That movie doesn't really take itself too seriously, so when you see absurd stuff like Marty's image slowly vanishing from a picture when he intrudes on his parents getting together, you laugh it off. It's the same thing on something like Futurama, with the "Fry is his own grandfather" storyline. Personally, if someone is doing a time travel story, I'd rather it be something like that. If they're going all straight-faced about it, I'll expect them to handle it in a believable manner, and chances are they will fail.
This is a terrible argument and one that gets used way to many times. ''It's fantasy, we have dragons here so there's no need to follow logic.'' This ''argument'' doesn't actually address anything it is just used as justification for people who enjoy something that it actually isn't bad. It's like when people say ''Don't like it don't watch it'', just so they can avoid argumenting why their favourite show is bad. This is a fantasy story so magic is universally accepted. That doesn't mean that everything should be allowed. A world needs to have a set of rules by which it operates, otherwise a writer could just write whatever he wants with the justification ''It's fantasy'' and get away with it. See Eragon for example. That world has a terrible handling of Magic. At the start it is supposed to be something special, but when the main character grows in power he starts to literally do anything he wants ''because it's magic'', including pulling gold from the middle of the earth. Afterwards he always just feels very tired and after a few days he can start doing new ridiculous things. It makes for a terrible read when everything goes because it's fantasy. So if you think this time-travelling business makes sense explain why and don't use this non-argument of ''it's fantasy.''
You misunderstand my argument I think. I'm not saying that because there's dragons, there should be no logic; I'm saying that because dragons and magic are readily accepted in-universe, the story must follow in-universe logic which may or may not correlate with outside-universe logic. This is where my mention of "willing suspension of disbelief" comes in, because that's exactly what this tension between sometimes competing logics is. For the purpose of the story, in-universe logic trumps outside-universe logic (which includes both real-world logic and in-universe logic for other works). If you can't do that, and outside-universe logic keeps making you doubt in-universe logic, then you don't have a willing suspension of disbelief, and your enjoyment of the work is greatly diminished. If the in-universe logic is not consistent, the willing suspension of disbelief is broken easier, but in the example we're discussing, the in-universe logic has been pretty consistent; and having certain individuals "fated" to exist in Tarkir 1.1 because they existed in Tarkir 1.0 does not contradict or violate that logic, even if it's not directly explained.
Why would I avoid this genre because I read a bad story?
This story (both this week's UR and the central Tarkir plotline), however in not a bad one; it follows it's own internally consistent logic reasonably well, and makes acceptably good use of alternate versions of known characters to illustrate the changes in the present from Sarkhan's alteration of the past, and more-so to demonstrate that Sarkhan's understanding of what he has done is still skewed and incomplete. All I was suggesting in that comment was this: If your willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go this far, maybe you might enjoy less "fantastic" stories more.
Causality has little to do with "science". If we cannot expect causal dependancy in events, then what can we actually expect from a story. When I throw a rock into a lake of water I expect the rock to sink to the bottom, not float at the top. Of course, when the lake is somehow magical and turns the rock into a flower then that is attributed to a special property of the lake. However, so far, there has been nothing to indicate that Tarkir somehow clones the people from alternate timelines or bends its own timeline in such a way that every person is a universal constant.
Even if that were true it raises the question, why is it important for the plane, to have a Taigam on it, but not who he is aligned with. Why are some things arbitrarily constant actross timelines and others aren't. The lack of causality really opens a can of worms. Suspension of disbelief is something that a story has to achieve and not just set. You cannot expect people to suspend their disbelief, you need to make them do it.
Causality has everything to do with logic and metaphysics, however. We believe that in real life causality exists because we have a system of logic that states that causality must exist for the world to exist in the form that it does, and have evidence to support that assumption. But until someone invents time travel into the past and has a way to both record changes and repeat the results, it is an assumption. I'm not saying it's a bad or unreasonable assumption, but we have no way to prove that causality exists and it is not some other force that guides the flow of time from cause to effect. Arguing causality must work the same way in a fantasy time travel story that it is believed to work in real life is applying outside-universe logic to in-universe situation. This is a world where individuals can learn the skills to see alternate timelines (the Temur shamans from Tarkir 1.0, who may or may not still be around). It's safe to assume that concepts like causality, free-will and fate may operate differently here than in anything outside-universe.
"A wizard did it" is not a good trope. I, and many other people, prefer stories to be internally consistent so that I can get involved. If I'm rooting for Frodo to go to Mount Doom and destroy the ring, I don't want him to suddenly say "actually, we don't need to go to Mount Doom, instead I'll just use this artifact we never mentionned that can destroy the ring forever". If you introduce a very rare Spice that enables you to do all kinds of magic, you don't want to casually mention that actually all that magic is done without the Spice by other factions in the Empire. It's easy to conceive of consistent rules for time travel. There are basically two flavors:
* Temporal loops. There is only one universe, and whatever happened happened. But instead of being acyclic, the causality graph can have arrow in both directions. An object can exist only because of a time loop: for exampe I can come across an object, then travel back in time to put it where I know I will find it: this object does not exist outside of a time loop. It can make some interesting stories but it's quite hard to use correctly as a plot device.
* Alternate universes. Everythime you go back in time you create a new universe, originated at your point of arrival, with no possible communication. Those rarely make interesting stories.
* Unspecified rules. Those are for stories that are really "fish out of temporal water" instead of using time travel as a plot device. Basically the time travel happens at the beginning and does not feature later in the story. I don't really count those as time-travel stories for this reason.
Warning: The following rant may be hard to follow, it's hard to judge. The TL;DR version is "too many big things change for us to accept that the small things stay the same."
Generally, good but not great time travel stories use non-explicit rules that are slightly inconsistent: you do create an alternate universe but somehow "merge" with your copy from that universe so that you are only one being. This is for example what is done is the Back to the Future movies. Yes, upon closer inspection they make no sense: Marty would definitely not exist with the same appearance and personnality given the different history of his parents, I mean according to all probability he was not made from the same gametes, and certainly not raised in the same environment. But at least you can sort of believe it: the movie handwaves this partly using "time loop" tropes, with Marty's mother mentionning that Marty is a nice name, and so on.
In this story, we have massive changes made a very, very long time ago, that somehow completely changed several aspects of Tarkir while leaving other untouched. Statistically, all the ghostfire warriors executed by Ugin were ancestors of all KTK-present Jeskai, which means their genealogy in DTK should be completely different. Even with an explanation (as in Terry Pratchett) of the universe wanting to right itself towards a "default" version, it does not justify the fact that many characters had completely different parents and yet apparently turned out to look and be named the same as some other character from KTK. It's even worse when you consider that there are probably a lot less humans in this version of Tarkir than in the previous one. If this is the case, then why do all the characters have "new" versions. Did the magical time-travel thing note the personalities of a select few humans and ported them into this new reality while making a backstory for them? Why them? It feels arbitrary and forced, and not at all what you would expect given the premise.
To try to put it another way: if someone made a movie about a white person returning through time to the American Civil War and making the South win instead of the North, you would not expect the protagonist to return to their present day family and find the same people with the same name, but owning slaves. That would normally utterly break your suspension of disbelief. The change in the universe is more important by several orders of magnitude than what people look like or what they're called. When Marty changes the relationship between his parents, we buy it that he stays mostly the same. When uchronies change the outcome of a war or another, we buy it that history after that stays roughly the same (for example: WW1 and WW2 still happen evn if the SOuth win the Civil War). When someone goes to the Jurrasic to get a dinosaur egg, we buy it that they did not change anything to our present when the butterfly effect could really have made everything different. But here we have a dragon sized-butterfly that fails to even produce enough wind to pick up a piece of paper.
Again, using the "Butterfly Effect" argument falls flat, because this is outside-universe logic; and you haven't even used it correctly in your own argument. We don't know that all changes in the timeline have equally dramatic effects on the timeline, which is exactly what the butterfly effect is. As an element of chaos theory, the "butterfly effect" postulates that because the number of factors involved in allowing a certain event to occur approach the infinite, the effects of altering one of those factors is unknowable. Your example of having the greatest change (going back and getting the dinosaur egg), based on known history is actually the least likely to have any effect on changing the modern day, unless that particular egg was somehow directly and essentially connected to the ELE that happened tens of millions of years later. It has the potential of dramatic change, but least likelihood of doing anything, because not every event has the same impact on everything around it. Popular culture has taken the brief summary statement of "A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and in New York you get sunshine instead of rain," to mean that every tiny change has huge dramatic impacts, but that's not what the theory says at all (same as the popular belief that E=Mc2 is Einstein's Theory of Relativity). But I digress.
The butterfly effect may not be in effect on Tarkir at all, or if it is, only weakly. One of the sets has "Fate" in the name, implying that the path of history will always be bent toward some point (presumably the life of Sarkhan). That, and as for your argument using the example of the ghostfire warriors in Tarkir 1.0, we don't know enough about the history of Tarkir 1.0 to say that. If fate is in play, and the timeline wants to build towards a particular point, than the non-dragons who died in the war between clans and dragons leading up to the fall of the clans in Tarkir 1.1 may have been the exact same people who died in the war between the clans and the dragons leading up to the extinction of the dragons in Tarkir 1.0 (a bit of an epileptic tree, I know, but it can fit within in-universe logic).
Sorry for the long post, but things are getting a little out of hand here with people over-thinking this story. Time travel is weird, there are may ways to do it, and everyone has a different opinion on the "right" way to write a time travel story, or if it should ever be done at all. I hear the same arguments (with different examples) from people who say that stories with magic or aliens or zombies are bad (don't get me started on the tomfoolery of magic alien zombies). They're not bad because you don't like them, or you don't understand the internal logic, or you don't get the lack of logic entirely. You just don't find it entertaining, and that's ok. Other people do, and that's ok.
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A polite player might call my card choices "interesting." At my budget, "interesting" is the only option.
I prefer the fate theory. There are certain souls destined to exist in the current time, regardless of the past. They may be slightly different, and arrive from different paths, but they are the same souls.
This story still sucks though. Time travel usually sucks, its only good when its exceptionally well done. Magic stories aren't good enough to do it right.
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The Meaning of Life: "M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations"
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Whether its blue players countering your spells, red players burning you out, or combo, if you have a problem with an aspect of Magic's gameplay, you can fix it!
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
So tell me, what are the rules of this version of time travel? I'm guessing you know them, or at least you are assuming you do, when you obviously do not. A fantasy story has to be consistent with ITSELF, not with everyone's preconceived ideas of what it should be, let alone yours.
Yes, modern time travel theories hypothesis suggest that the butterfly effect of what Sarkhan did would change Tarkir too much to be seeing familiar characters with only relatively small altered history, but the possibility exists, even through modern hypothesis, it is improbable, but possible.
I'm gonna guess they are not gonna bother explaining how this particular "breed" of time travel works, just to avoid this exact problem, and i'mt fine with it, as long as the story is believable within it's own context, that is, magic exists, Dagons exists, Sarkhan is a man dominated by his own emotions that can transform into a dragon at will (defying every law of physics in the process), and time travel works however they see fit as long as they don't try to explain it in a "scientific way".
Been saying it for months and my opinion hasn't changed: Sarkhan is a terrible main character (for this kind of story).
Had we gotten Sorin, someone who sees things objectively, as a main character, then this story would be a lot more palatable. Or at the very least, give Sarkhan a companion that views things differently from him.
Using him being a red character as justification for his sudden "NO NARSET NO DEAL" mentality is not a very well-thought-out argument. Chandra, who is mono-red, got a pretty good novel in The Purifying Fire. Laura Resnick was a good enough writer to know that the Chandra character cannot be a good lens for the readers to see the world through as he priorities are a bit skewed, so what does she do? She creates a foil for Chandra that sticks around for most of the story called Gideon Jura. Gideon served as the voice of the reader, raising ethical issues that Chandra as a character simply wouldn't think about. She's red, so she likes blowing things up, okay. Gideon was the voice that said, "Do you realize how many people your explosion hurt and killed?" Chandra was then forced to come to terms with that.
It's not just an outside author thing either. Jenna Helland had the good sense to pair Elspeth up with Daxos and have other Therans around so they can provide real context to the things happening and challenge Elspeth's notions about the world. Jenna's on the Creative Team and she wrote Godsend, so I don't know why she didn't maybe tell them they'd need a more rational character. Some might say that was Narset, but it really wasn't. She was fully on board with Sarkhan's lunacy from the get-go. The closest thing we got to a dissenting opinion was Yasova, and the narrative was just disdainful of her with how it humiliated her and swept her point underneath a rug, hoping nobody would find it.
Really, a Gideon or a Daxos is something Sarkhan and this story lacks: someone to be the voice for the reader. We're just tagging along Sarkhan's frantic hopping from place to place on Tarkir.
Well, the story is what it is, whether you hate how its done or not. A more fun and enlightening conversation would be the implications of Sarkhan's actions, and what people think Tarkir 1.1 will be like. It feels like the time travel argument has run its course.
We know Surrak is now the Hunter Caller and not Surrak Dragonclaw. I wonder if they delve into that at all. Does Surrak know the part that Yasova played in Tarkir's history? Atarka from what we have seen, so far, hasnt proactively tried to wipe the history aspect from the the clan formally known as Temur. It doesnt have much baring on the story but I would like to find out why he has so much disdain for the Ainok. In Tarkir 1.0 they were highly regarded and now something has happened that has maybe caused some divide, or at least some racism (specie-sim?).
So we now have Sarkhan racing to the cocooned Ugin, where I'm guessing he'll run into Sorin, too. A lot of people have been assuming that Ugin wont like Tarkir 1.1 because of the dragon dominance, but idk about that, there is more balance now in Tarkir 1.1 than in Tarkir 1.0. The humanoids caused the extinction of the dragons.
Was the time travel really the issue with the latest UR? I thought people were just upset about Sarkhan having a sudden and irrational infatuation with Narset that he has never expressed so strongly before.
The time travel is neither good nor bad until we see the set to completion, but the writing of the main character of this block was poor this time.
The thing is, even if we do try and pick the story apart logically, people are using faulty logic to do so. Yes, it is true that the butterfly effect makes it very unlikely that Tarkir 1.1 would have nearly identical versions of the people from Tarkir 1.0, but it isn't impossible. If you think it is, I don't think you really understand how probability works.
If I put the individual parts of a cellphone inside a box and shake it, it is also theoretically possible to open the box with a complete cellphone inside. Possible, but so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all.
You say "so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all", I say "any possibility is worth considering, no matter how improbable". Because in fiction "one in a million chances will crop up nine times out of ten". As a wise man once said, "never tell me the odds".
I like it when people say "we don't know how timetravel would work in reality" and then comically wave their arms in the air.
Here's the thing: We travel through time literally every second. We know that certain events lead to others and in return what caused them. There is literally no reason to believe that changing something in the past somehow stirs some metaphysical beast that tries to correct this affront of trans-chronical tomfoolery. Insert Occam's Razor here.
The butterfly effect may not be in effect on Tarkir at all, or if it is, only weakly. One of the sets has "Fate" in the name, implying that the path of history will always be bent toward some point (presumably the life of Sarkhan). That, and as for your argument using the example of the ghostfire warriors in Tarkir 1.0, we don't know enough about the history of Tarkir 1.0 to say that. If fate is in play, and the timeline wants to build towards a particular point, than the non-dragons who died in the war between clans and dragons leading up to the fall of the clans in Tarkir 1.1 may have been the exact same people who died in the war between the clans and the dragons leading up to the extinction of the dragons in Tarkir 1.0 (a bit of an epileptic tree, I know, but it can fit within in-universe logic).
I suppose this is all very subjective, but what you said is so convoluted and needlessly complicated that I'm left wondering, why would I even want to go through that in order to suspend my disbelief.
I mean, I really want to like the Tarkir storyline, I really do. Timetravel stories are my favourites, but... The way it has been handled. I can't say I didn't expect it, but it's just so bad.
There is no obvious plot driving force that has emerged in DtK to me, yet. Some of the more recent sets like Avacyn, Rise, and New Phyrexia were blatant.We knew Avacyan was coming back to restore balance on Innistrad, and just by the title we new that the Phyrexians had won against the Mirran resistance. But with the end of FRF we already knew the dragons won and the clans lost. Whats the big conflict that will push this set or create "resolution"? Will the "clans" be in a planar war that endangers the entire plane? Will Ugin actually start changing things? Does Bolas come back once Ugin awakens? Idk.. I feel like there has to be more to DTK than just here's how it isnt KTK.
Time travel stories is always convoluted.Wizards just did it to bring back Ugin to the main plot since i have the impression back in Zendikar they haven't planned the story advance enough for all of this.Eitherway some of you taking this way to serious time traveling stories is always confusing so i don't midn if Wizards did this way
There is no obvious plot driving force has emerged in DtK to me, yet. Some of the more recent sets like Avacyn, Rise, and New Phyrexia were blatant.We knew Avacyan was coming back to restore balance on Innistrad, and just by the title we new that the Phyrexians had won against the Mirran resistance. But with the end of FRF we already knew the dragons won and the clans lost. Whats the big conflict that will push this set or create "resolution"? Will the "clans" be in a planar war that endangers the entire plane? Will Ugin actually start changing things? Does Bolas come back once Ugin awakens? Idk.. I feel like there has to be more to DTK than just here's how it isnt KTK.
On the other side of this, not every set or world needs to have multi-verse altering consequences. Some places/stories will be more self contained. Of course this story does in fact have important other world implications indirectly through Ugin.
The thing is, even if we do try and pick the story apart logically, people are using faulty logic to do so. Yes, it is true that the butterfly effect makes it very unlikely that Tarkir 1.1 would have nearly identical versions of the people from Tarkir 1.0, but it isn't impossible. If you think it is, I don't think you really understand how probability works.
If I put the individual parts of a cellphone inside a box and shake it, it is also theoretically possible to open the box with a complete cellphone inside. Possible, but so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all.
You say "so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all", I say "any possibility is worth considering, no matter how improbable". Because in fiction "one in a million chances will crop up nine times out of ten". As a wise man once said, "never tell me the odds".
And if you honestly believe the self-assembling cellphone in the box makes for a good story, then we have completely different standards for the quality of stories.
Jivanmukta: Oh yeah, I agree. I'm totally cool with stories not having multiverse-wide implications. I actually enjoy the change of pace when they dont. Avacyn killing a bunch of vampires and demons didnt have much a ripple effect. I'm just curious as to what are the "vampires and demons" in this set. (Also, I just keep trying to get people off the time travel conversation into more interesting topics.)
signofzeta: I'm actually really looking forward to see the changes in characters and I'm sure there will be plenty of parallel cards. I belive it was mentioned but that art of Taigam was very similar to Deflecting Palm.
The thing is, even if we do try and pick the story apart logically, people are using faulty logic to do so. Yes, it is true that the butterfly effect makes it very unlikely that Tarkir 1.1 would have nearly identical versions of the people from Tarkir 1.0, but it isn't impossible. If you think it is, I don't think you really understand how probability works.
If I put the individual parts of a cellphone inside a box and shake it, it is also theoretically possible to open the box with a complete cellphone inside. Possible, but so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all.
You say "so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all", I say "any possibility is worth considering, no matter how improbable". Because in fiction "one in a million chances will crop up nine times out of ten". As a wise man once said, "never tell me the odds".
And if you honestly believe the self-assembling cellphone in the box makes for a good story, then we have completely different standards for the quality of stories.
Well obviously "a cellphone just happens to do something very unlikely while inside a box" doesn't make for a very good narrative, but what it does do is make a fine seed for one. Events centered around the cellphone or resulting from it could evolve into a fine story. By the same token, "Tarkir 1.1 doesn't seem very likely but oh well" isn't the whole of Tarkir Block's narrative either. There's a whole bunch of other stuff involved with and connected to the Tarkir 1.1 as well.
I like it when people say "we don't know how timetravel would work in reality" and then comically wave their arms in the air.
Here's the thing: We travel through time literally every second. We know that certain events lead to others and in return what caused them. There is literally no reason to believe that changing something in the past somehow stirs some metaphysical beast that tries to correct this affront of trans-chronical tomfoolery. Insert Occam's Razor here.
People once used reasoning similar to Occam's Razor to believe that adult frogs were spontaneously generated from thawing mud in the spring rather than considering more complicated ideas of hibernation. On the one hand, simpler isn't always better; on the other, you are again applying a real-world philosophy of causality to a fictional universe that has explicitly different metaphysics. Note that I never said that causality is a bad philosophy in relation to real-life metaphysics, but that when evaluating a fictional world, that philosophy does not necessarily apply. I only made mention of it in real-world terms to establish it as a philosophical stance that defines and informs science, rather than a scientifically derived principle (basically: causality makes science work, science didn't discover causality).
I suppose this is all very subjective, but what you said is so convoluted and needlessly complicated that I'm left wondering, why would I even want to go through that in order to suspend my disbelief.
Like I said, an epileptic tree. I don't necessarily think that's what's going on, just spit-balling ideas.
I mean, I really want to like the Tarkir storyline, I really do. Timetravel stories are my favourites, but... The way it has been handled. I can't say I didn't expect it, but it's just so bad.
It strikes me from your comments that you're more picky with time travel stories than most people. I agree that well constructed time travel stories are great, but we must have differing opinions on what makes a well constructed time travel story. I tend to be very forgiving on the mechanics of time travel, mostly because the only reference we have for how it would work are works of fiction and scientific hypotheticals that are usually based on unproven theories based on what I find to be questionable philosophical foundations. As long as the characters are showcased in an interesting and engaging manner, I'll enjoy most time travel stories (which is why I prefer the Austin Powers sequels to the Back to the Future films; one makes something of an attempt to make time travel work in a vaguely logical way with somewhat generic characters, while the other doesn't bother and lets time travel be a vehicle for silly characters to be silly). I think this story has been a good way to explore Sarkhan's attempts to make sense of and/or come to terms with his chaotic life.
Been saying it for months and my opinion hasn't changed: Sarkhan is a terrible main character (for this kind of story).
Had we gotten Sorin, someone who sees things objectively, as a main character, then this story would be a lot more palatable. Or at the very least, give Sarkhan a companion that views things differently from him.
Using him being a red character as justification for his sudden "NO NARSET NO DEAL" mentality is not a very well-thought-out argument. Chandra, who is mono-red, got a pretty good novel in The Purifying Fire. Laura Resnick was a good enough writer to know that the Chandra character cannot be a good lens for the readers to see the world through as he priorities are a bit skewed, so what does she do? She creates a foil for Chandra that sticks around for most of the story called Gideon Jura. Gideon served as the voice of the reader, raising ethical issues that Chandra as a character simply wouldn't think about. She's red, so she likes blowing things up, okay. Gideon was the voice that said, "Do you realize how many people your explosion hurt and killed?" Chandra was then forced to come to terms with that.
It's not just an outside author thing either. Jenna Helland had the good sense to pair Elspeth up with Daxos and have other Therans around so they can provide real context to the things happening and challenge Elspeth's notions about the world. Jenna's on the Creative Team and she wrote Godsend, so I don't know why she didn't maybe tell them they'd need a more rational character. Some might say that was Narset, but it really wasn't. She was fully on board with Sarkhan's lunacy from the get-go. The closest thing we got to a dissenting opinion was Yasova, and the narrative was just disdainful of her with how it humiliated her and swept her point underneath a rug, hoping nobody would find it.
Really, a Gideon or a Daxos is something Sarkhan and this story lacks: someone to be the voice for the reader. We're just tagging along Sarkhan's frantic hopping from place to place on Tarkir.
I like the unreliable narrator in the story; while having a "voice of reason" character like in previous stories is good, Sarkhan is only getting to the point where he would listen to any such character now, if that. Having one with him constantly to this point would be out of character; he's too paranoid after his servitude to Bolas to trust anyone, even himself. This story is as much about Sarkhan's reclaiming of his own mind as it is about whether there are dragons on a particular plane or not. His actions being morally skewed and difficult for others to understand in the earlier part of the story are kind of the point, even he doesn't understand why he feels and acts the way he does. He seems to be becoming aware of how skewed his morals are, and is starting to take action based on his own reasoning rather than what the voices in his head tell him. It's a redemption/recovery from madness tale, which can't really be told unless we see how messed up he was to begin with. That being said, Sarkhan's not out of the woods yet, and they may decide that it's a failed redemption/recovery story and send him back into madness.
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"Tarn" is a mountain lake. Do you see any lake there?
Let this great clan rest in peace (2001-2011)
Causality has little to do with "science". If we cannot expect causal dependancy in events, then what can we actually expect from a story. When I throw a rock into a lake of water I expect the rock to sink to the bottom, not float at the top. Of course, when the lake is somehow magical and turns the rock into a flower then that is attributed to a special property of the lake. However, so far, there has been nothing to indicate that Tarkir somehow clones the people from alternate timelines or bends its own timeline in such a way that every person is a universal constant.
Even if that were true it raises the question, why is it important for the plane, to have a Taigam on it, but not who he is aligned with. Why are some things arbitrarily constant actross timelines and others aren't. The lack of causality really opens a can of worms. Suspension of disbelief is something that a story has to achieve and not just set. You cannot expect people to suspend their disbelief, you need to make them do it.
If I put the individual parts of a cellphone inside a box and shake it, it is also theoretically possible to open the box with a complete cellphone inside. Possible, but so improbable that it's hardly worth considering a possibility at all.
yes we don't have evidence, but i assume that's the same way it would have, otherwise, Yasova and other would have tried to finish off Ugin. so there has to be a condition to open the hedrons. Ugin would not have devised another way since he would have buried the secret with him, and he wouldn't want that. so a method already known should be the case.
I dont get how time traveling can get people all upset when we have literally never done it and therefore no idea how would/could really work. Whose to say "temporal forces" wouldnt try to keep things as close as possible to their original outcome.
I just want to point out that in the case of something like Back to the Future, it's a bit different. That movie doesn't really take itself too seriously, so when you see absurd stuff like Marty's image slowly vanishing from a picture when he intrudes on his parents getting together, you laugh it off. It's the same thing on something like Futurama, with the "Fry is his own grandfather" storyline. Personally, if someone is doing a time travel story, I'd rather it be something like that. If they're going all straight-faced about it, I'll expect them to handle it in a believable manner, and chances are they will fail.
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You misunderstand my argument I think. I'm not saying that because there's dragons, there should be no logic; I'm saying that because dragons and magic are readily accepted in-universe, the story must follow in-universe logic which may or may not correlate with outside-universe logic. This is where my mention of "willing suspension of disbelief" comes in, because that's exactly what this tension between sometimes competing logics is. For the purpose of the story, in-universe logic trumps outside-universe logic (which includes both real-world logic and in-universe logic for other works). If you can't do that, and outside-universe logic keeps making you doubt in-universe logic, then you don't have a willing suspension of disbelief, and your enjoyment of the work is greatly diminished. If the in-universe logic is not consistent, the willing suspension of disbelief is broken easier, but in the example we're discussing, the in-universe logic has been pretty consistent; and having certain individuals "fated" to exist in Tarkir 1.1 because they existed in Tarkir 1.0 does not contradict or violate that logic, even if it's not directly explained.
This story (both this week's UR and the central Tarkir plotline), however in not a bad one; it follows it's own internally consistent logic reasonably well, and makes acceptably good use of alternate versions of known characters to illustrate the changes in the present from Sarkhan's alteration of the past, and more-so to demonstrate that Sarkhan's understanding of what he has done is still skewed and incomplete. All I was suggesting in that comment was this: If your willing suspension of disbelief doesn't go this far, maybe you might enjoy less "fantastic" stories more.
Causality has everything to do with logic and metaphysics, however. We believe that in real life causality exists because we have a system of logic that states that causality must exist for the world to exist in the form that it does, and have evidence to support that assumption. But until someone invents time travel into the past and has a way to both record changes and repeat the results, it is an assumption. I'm not saying it's a bad or unreasonable assumption, but we have no way to prove that causality exists and it is not some other force that guides the flow of time from cause to effect. Arguing causality must work the same way in a fantasy time travel story that it is believed to work in real life is applying outside-universe logic to in-universe situation. This is a world where individuals can learn the skills to see alternate timelines (the Temur shamans from Tarkir 1.0, who may or may not still be around). It's safe to assume that concepts like causality, free-will and fate may operate differently here than in anything outside-universe.
Again, using the "Butterfly Effect" argument falls flat, because this is outside-universe logic; and you haven't even used it correctly in your own argument. We don't know that all changes in the timeline have equally dramatic effects on the timeline, which is exactly what the butterfly effect is. As an element of chaos theory, the "butterfly effect" postulates that because the number of factors involved in allowing a certain event to occur approach the infinite, the effects of altering one of those factors is unknowable. Your example of having the greatest change (going back and getting the dinosaur egg), based on known history is actually the least likely to have any effect on changing the modern day, unless that particular egg was somehow directly and essentially connected to the ELE that happened tens of millions of years later. It has the potential of dramatic change, but least likelihood of doing anything, because not every event has the same impact on everything around it. Popular culture has taken the brief summary statement of "A butterfly flaps its wings in China, and in New York you get sunshine instead of rain," to mean that every tiny change has huge dramatic impacts, but that's not what the theory says at all (same as the popular belief that E=Mc2 is Einstein's Theory of Relativity). But I digress.
The butterfly effect may not be in effect on Tarkir at all, or if it is, only weakly. One of the sets has "Fate" in the name, implying that the path of history will always be bent toward some point (presumably the life of Sarkhan). That, and as for your argument using the example of the ghostfire warriors in Tarkir 1.0, we don't know enough about the history of Tarkir 1.0 to say that. If fate is in play, and the timeline wants to build towards a particular point, than the non-dragons who died in the war between clans and dragons leading up to the fall of the clans in Tarkir 1.1 may have been the exact same people who died in the war between the clans and the dragons leading up to the extinction of the dragons in Tarkir 1.0 (a bit of an epileptic tree, I know, but it can fit within in-universe logic).
Sorry for the long post, but things are getting a little out of hand here with people over-thinking this story. Time travel is weird, there are may ways to do it, and everyone has a different opinion on the "right" way to write a time travel story, or if it should ever be done at all. I hear the same arguments (with different examples) from people who say that stories with magic or aliens or zombies are bad (don't get me started on the tomfoolery of magic alien zombies). They're not bad because you don't like them, or you don't understand the internal logic, or you don't get the lack of logic entirely. You just don't find it entertaining, and that's ok. Other people do, and that's ok.
This story still sucks though. Time travel usually sucks, its only good when its exceptionally well done. Magic stories aren't good enough to do it right.
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Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
Yes, modern time travel
theorieshypothesis suggest that the butterfly effect of what Sarkhan did would change Tarkir too much to be seeing familiar characters with only relatively small altered history, but the possibility exists, even through modern hypothesis, it is improbable, but possible.I'm gonna guess they are not gonna bother explaining how this particular "breed" of time travel works, just to avoid this exact problem, and i'mt fine with it, as long as the story is believable within it's own context, that is, magic exists, Dagons exists, Sarkhan is a man dominated by his own emotions that can transform into a dragon at will (defying every law of physics in the process), and time travel works however they see fit as long as they don't try to explain it in a "scientific way".
UR Melek, Izzet ParagonUR, B Shirei, Shizo's CaretakerB, R Jaya Ballard, Task MageR,RW Tajic, Blade of the LegionRW, UB Lazav, Dimir MastermindUB, UB Circu, Dimir LobotomistUB, RWU Zedruu the GreatheartedRWU, GUBThe MimeoplasmGUB, UGExperiment Kraj UG, WDarien, King of KjeldorW, BMarrow-GnawerB, WBGKarador, Ghost ChieftainWBG, UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU, GWUDerevi, Empyrial TacticianGWU, RDaretti, Scrap SavantR, UTalrand, Sky SummonerU, GEzuri, Renegade LeaderG, WUBRGReaper KingWUBRG, RGXenagos, God of RevelsRG, CKozilek, Butcher of TruthC, WUBRGGeneral TazriWUBRG, GTitania, Protector of ArgothG
Had we gotten Sorin, someone who sees things objectively, as a main character, then this story would be a lot more palatable. Or at the very least, give Sarkhan a companion that views things differently from him.
Using him being a red character as justification for his sudden "NO NARSET NO DEAL" mentality is not a very well-thought-out argument. Chandra, who is mono-red, got a pretty good novel in The Purifying Fire. Laura Resnick was a good enough writer to know that the Chandra character cannot be a good lens for the readers to see the world through as he priorities are a bit skewed, so what does she do? She creates a foil for Chandra that sticks around for most of the story called Gideon Jura. Gideon served as the voice of the reader, raising ethical issues that Chandra as a character simply wouldn't think about. She's red, so she likes blowing things up, okay. Gideon was the voice that said, "Do you realize how many people your explosion hurt and killed?" Chandra was then forced to come to terms with that.
It's not just an outside author thing either. Jenna Helland had the good sense to pair Elspeth up with Daxos and have other Therans around so they can provide real context to the things happening and challenge Elspeth's notions about the world. Jenna's on the Creative Team and she wrote Godsend, so I don't know why she didn't maybe tell them they'd need a more rational character. Some might say that was Narset, but it really wasn't. She was fully on board with Sarkhan's lunacy from the get-go. The closest thing we got to a dissenting opinion was Yasova, and the narrative was just disdainful of her with how it humiliated her and swept her point underneath a rug, hoping nobody would find it.
Really, a Gideon or a Daxos is something Sarkhan and this story lacks: someone to be the voice for the reader. We're just tagging along Sarkhan's frantic hopping from place to place on Tarkir.
Your mods are terrified of me.
We know Surrak is now the Hunter Caller and not Surrak Dragonclaw. I wonder if they delve into that at all. Does Surrak know the part that Yasova played in Tarkir's history? Atarka from what we have seen, so far, hasnt proactively tried to wipe the history aspect from the the clan formally known as Temur. It doesnt have much baring on the story but I would like to find out why he has so much disdain for the Ainok. In Tarkir 1.0 they were highly regarded and now something has happened that has maybe caused some divide, or at least some racism (specie-sim?).
So we now have Sarkhan racing to the cocooned Ugin, where I'm guessing he'll run into Sorin, too. A lot of people have been assuming that Ugin wont like Tarkir 1.1 because of the dragon dominance, but idk about that, there is more balance now in Tarkir 1.1 than in Tarkir 1.0. The humanoids caused the extinction of the dragons.
The time travel is neither good nor bad until we see the set to completion, but the writing of the main character of this block was poor this time.
Here's the thing: We travel through time literally every second. We know that certain events lead to others and in return what caused them. There is literally no reason to believe that changing something in the past somehow stirs some metaphysical beast that tries to correct this affront of trans-chronical tomfoolery. Insert Occam's Razor here.
I suppose this is all very subjective, but what you said is so convoluted and needlessly complicated that I'm left wondering, why would I even want to go through that in order to suspend my disbelief.
I mean, I really want to like the Tarkir storyline, I really do. Timetravel stories are my favourites, but... The way it has been handled. I can't say I didn't expect it, but it's just so bad.
And they're just as wrong as you for invoking the Razor.
It's fun when no one is right.
On the other side of this, not every set or world needs to have multi-verse altering consequences. Some places/stories will be more self contained. Of course this story does in fact have important other world implications indirectly through Ugin.
And if you honestly believe the self-assembling cellphone in the box makes for a good story, then we have completely different standards for the quality of stories.
signofzeta: I'm actually really looking forward to see the changes in characters and I'm sure there will be plenty of parallel cards. I belive it was mentioned but that art of Taigam was very similar to Deflecting Palm.
Well obviously "a cellphone just happens to do something very unlikely while inside a box" doesn't make for a very good narrative, but what it does do is make a fine seed for one. Events centered around the cellphone or resulting from it could evolve into a fine story. By the same token, "Tarkir 1.1 doesn't seem very likely but oh well" isn't the whole of Tarkir Block's narrative either. There's a whole bunch of other stuff involved with and connected to the Tarkir 1.1 as well.
People once used reasoning similar to Occam's Razor to believe that adult frogs were spontaneously generated from thawing mud in the spring rather than considering more complicated ideas of hibernation. On the one hand, simpler isn't always better; on the other, you are again applying a real-world philosophy of causality to a fictional universe that has explicitly different metaphysics. Note that I never said that causality is a bad philosophy in relation to real-life metaphysics, but that when evaluating a fictional world, that philosophy does not necessarily apply. I only made mention of it in real-world terms to establish it as a philosophical stance that defines and informs science, rather than a scientifically derived principle (basically: causality makes science work, science didn't discover causality).
Like I said, an epileptic tree. I don't necessarily think that's what's going on, just spit-balling ideas.
It strikes me from your comments that you're more picky with time travel stories than most people. I agree that well constructed time travel stories are great, but we must have differing opinions on what makes a well constructed time travel story. I tend to be very forgiving on the mechanics of time travel, mostly because the only reference we have for how it would work are works of fiction and scientific hypotheticals that are usually based on unproven theories based on what I find to be questionable philosophical foundations. As long as the characters are showcased in an interesting and engaging manner, I'll enjoy most time travel stories (which is why I prefer the Austin Powers sequels to the Back to the Future films; one makes something of an attempt to make time travel work in a vaguely logical way with somewhat generic characters, while the other doesn't bother and lets time travel be a vehicle for silly characters to be silly). I think this story has been a good way to explore Sarkhan's attempts to make sense of and/or come to terms with his chaotic life.
I like the unreliable narrator in the story; while having a "voice of reason" character like in previous stories is good, Sarkhan is only getting to the point where he would listen to any such character now, if that. Having one with him constantly to this point would be out of character; he's too paranoid after his servitude to Bolas to trust anyone, even himself. This story is as much about Sarkhan's reclaiming of his own mind as it is about whether there are dragons on a particular plane or not. His actions being morally skewed and difficult for others to understand in the earlier part of the story are kind of the point, even he doesn't understand why he feels and acts the way he does. He seems to be becoming aware of how skewed his morals are, and is starting to take action based on his own reasoning rather than what the voices in his head tell him. It's a redemption/recovery from madness tale, which can't really be told unless we see how messed up he was to begin with. That being said, Sarkhan's not out of the woods yet, and they may decide that it's a failed redemption/recovery story and send him back into madness.